(Mis)-Education in Canada
One of the problems that is starting to exhibit itself in our society are the side-effects of the so-called "Self-Esteem Education Model". This is where a focus of the education system is to make students feel better about themselves under the psychological theory that students with higher self-esteem will perform better.
One problem. It doesn't appear to be a very good theory (link to January 2005 SciAm article). Now you might ask why I am posting to this some 10 months after Scientific American published this article ? Because I've recently come to observe two effects of this, at either end of the education establishment.
First, there is the case of the second grader. The student is struggling at simple mathematics such as addition, and has not yet attempted subtraction or more complex mathemetical concepts. In fact, the student does not yet understand place value. But the student gets many "checkmarks" on their work because they "complete all the assigned work". Initially the checkmarks appear to have little to do with how many of the problems are solved correctly. Later, the checkmarks are applied to only the correct answers, but there is no time limit and if the student chooses to guess they are encouraged to continue guessing until they get the correct answer.
This isn't how I learned math 30 years ago. We learned the basic mathematical axioms (ie. adding single digit numbers together), and then the algorithm for handling larger values. Of course at that time the students didn't need to know the meaning of axiom or algorithm, but it was the process. The system now appears geared toward making the student feel good about themselves and then hoping that the student eventually figures it out. Poor practice in my view.
The second example of this problem comes with the University system. I have learned from professors at my alma mater that the entrance requirement from high school into the faculty I attended is now around 90%. I would not have gotten in. Yet the professors indicate that the first year students are hopeless at structuring an idea in an essay and are asking that they be given a "template or outline" for a paper... Wait!!!! - I thought that was part of the student's job.... Also, they are finding that these students who acheived 90%+ averages in high school are struggling far more with first term calculus than did students even 10 years ago. They simply don't understand the fundamentals.
Further, these students who have never truly been challenged or faced failure are having crises when they do fail at the university level. And their recourse has been to complain about the professors' (racial, sexual, ethnic discrimination) rather than possibly admit that THEY have actually failed.
Pathethic is what it is...
One problem. It doesn't appear to be a very good theory (link to January 2005 SciAm article). Now you might ask why I am posting to this some 10 months after Scientific American published this article ? Because I've recently come to observe two effects of this, at either end of the education establishment.
First, there is the case of the second grader. The student is struggling at simple mathematics such as addition, and has not yet attempted subtraction or more complex mathemetical concepts. In fact, the student does not yet understand place value. But the student gets many "checkmarks" on their work because they "complete all the assigned work". Initially the checkmarks appear to have little to do with how many of the problems are solved correctly. Later, the checkmarks are applied to only the correct answers, but there is no time limit and if the student chooses to guess they are encouraged to continue guessing until they get the correct answer.
This isn't how I learned math 30 years ago. We learned the basic mathematical axioms (ie. adding single digit numbers together), and then the algorithm for handling larger values. Of course at that time the students didn't need to know the meaning of axiom or algorithm, but it was the process. The system now appears geared toward making the student feel good about themselves and then hoping that the student eventually figures it out. Poor practice in my view.
The second example of this problem comes with the University system. I have learned from professors at my alma mater that the entrance requirement from high school into the faculty I attended is now around 90%. I would not have gotten in. Yet the professors indicate that the first year students are hopeless at structuring an idea in an essay and are asking that they be given a "template or outline" for a paper... Wait!!!! - I thought that was part of the student's job.... Also, they are finding that these students who acheived 90%+ averages in high school are struggling far more with first term calculus than did students even 10 years ago. They simply don't understand the fundamentals.
Further, these students who have never truly been challenged or faced failure are having crises when they do fail at the university level. And their recourse has been to complain about the professors' (racial, sexual, ethnic discrimination) rather than possibly admit that THEY have actually failed.
Pathethic is what it is...
posted by Technical Bard | 21:07
3 Comments:
This is one of these subjects that can get me off on a rant against the education system. It drives me absolutely crazy to see this promoted culture of self-esteem.
Whatever happened to simple concepts such as failure? Failure is a fact of life yet in our school system, we try to disguise it as it might "hurt" the children. That is absolutely ridiculous. What it creates is a generation of children who grow up sheltered from failure and are unable to cope. When a student fails, they should not move onto the next grade, period. Also, things such as getting rid of red pen and all signs of "negativity" needs to be reversed. If children are exposed to failure at an early age, they can learn from it and deal with it so they can handle bigger ones later on in life.
This is one of these subjects I have ranted for half an hour on because it absolutely infuriates me. On my blog about three weeks ago, I made a post of my idealized revision to the education system to deal with these absurd policies. It's time to go back to actually teaching students, including how to deal with failure and challenges, rather than sheltering them to help their self-esteem.
Grade inflation has been a real problem. At Harvard - Harvey Mansfield gives two grades - the inflated grade and the real grade. To use the U.S for an example - U.S. students usually rank themselves the highest in terms of ability but actually rank closer to the middle or bottom. This is what "self esteem" based education does - making them overconfident and destined for failure.
A further problem with this sort of approach is it requires students to evaluate their own progress, because they're never told they're doing badly. And that doesn't work.
Here's a study:
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/unskilled-and-unaware.html
Basically it says that the skills required to be good at something are the same skills required to evaluate one's own competence, and thus people who are bad at something are generally blissfully unaware of it.
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